LIDS & Stats Tea Talk

Wednesday, October 2, 2024 - 4:00pm

Event Calendar Category

LIDS & Stats Tea

Speaker Name

Swati Padmanabhan

Affiliation

LIDS, IDSS

Building and Room number

32-D650

Building and Room Number

LIDS Lounge

"Some recent theoretical results in algorithms for nonconvex optimization"

In this talk, we present some recent results on the theoretical guarantees for nonconvex optimization. We will first briefly describe first-order algorithms for attaining stationarity in general Lipschitz functions (based on [1]); we will then describe our recent first-order algorithmic guarantees for bilevel optimization (a special class of nonconvex problems) with linear constraints (results based on [2]). Finally, we will touch upon recent hardness results on attaining local minima in nonsmooth nonconvex optimization (based on [3]).

[1] "A gradient sampling method with complexity guarantees for Lipschitz functions in high and low dimensions". D. Davis*, D. Drusvyatskiy*, S. Padmanabhan*, Y. T. Lee*, G. Ye*. Published in NeurIPS 2022 (oral). arXiv: 2112.06969

[2] "First-order methods for linearly constrained bilevel optimization". G. Kornowski*, S. Padmanabhan*, K. Wang*, Z. Zhang*, and S. Sra. To appear in NeurIPS 2024. arXiv: 2406.12771

[3] "On the hardness of meaningful local guarantees in nonsmooth nonconvex optimization". G. Kornowski*, S. Padmanbhan*, O. Shamir. arXiv: 2409.10323

Swati is a postdoc at LIDS and IDSS. Her research interests are in the theory of optimization algorithms for problems in machine learning, control theory, and theoretical computer science. She is on the job market for tenure-track faculty positions this year.

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ABOUT LIDS & Stats TEA TALKS:
Tea talks are 20-minute-long informal chalk-talks for the purpose of sharing ideas and creating awareness about some of the topics that could be of interest to the LIDS and Stats audience.
The session is followed by light refreshments and hot beverages.
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Kind regards,
LIDS & Stats Tea Talks Committee
Maison Clouatre, Subham Saha, Ashkan Soleymani, Jia Wan